Eclipse Deployment Assembly - Creates .war of dependency project inside main project WEB-INF/lib?

Question

I have a main web project that contains all the things required to deploy and hit the page via a browser. Then I have several "functions" each as a separate project that can be included into the main project.

To take an example, I have MainApp and functions.reportsApp.

When building these with ant the following happens:

- MainApp.war
  - mainApp/jsf/Pages.faces, etc
  - reportsApp/jsf/Reports.faces, etc
  - WEB-INF/web.xml, mainapp-faces-config.xml, reportsApp-faces.config.xml, etc
  - WEB-INF/lib
     - MainApp.jar
       - META-INF/* (MainApp's)
       - my/company/MainApp/Code.class 
     - functions.reportsApp.jar
       - META-INF/* (reportsApp's)
       - my/company/reportsApp/Code.class

This works fine, and as I understand .war and .jar spec, is correct.

In Eclipse though, I want to have both projects open and deploy/develop to the Tomcat server setup there. I have the following:

Imported both projects, setup MainApp to have ReportsApp as a project dependency (via, MainApp-Properties, Java Build Path, Projects).

NOTE: MainApp's web.xml specifies:

<param-name>javax.faces.CONFIG_FILES</param-name>
<param-value>
/WEB-INF/reportsApp-faces-config.xml,
/WEB-INF/mainApp-faces-config.xml
</param-value>

reportApp's web.xml specifies:

<param-name>javax.faces.CONFIG_FILES</param-name>
<param-value>
/WEB-INF/reportsApp-faces-config.xml
</param-value>

I notice in MainApp-Properties-Deployment Assembly that Eclipse created:

src:functions.reportsApp, deployPath: WEB-INF/lib

This turns up deployed by Eclipse as Tomcat/webapps/MainApp/WEB-INF/lib/functions.reportsApp.war. WAR? This makes no sense to me and doesn't work.

To make it work, I have to:

Add to MainApp a folder which I (via the Advanced section) Link to ReportApp's web directory.
Add to MainApp's Deployment Assembly that linked folder and select MainApp's web folder as the 'Folder for deployment descriptor'

That gets me the web/* (JSF, etc.) content into Tomcat/webapps/MainApp and the WEB-INF content of ReportsApp merged into WEB-INF of MainApp.

I also have to make sure that MainApp's Deployment Assembly contains functions.reportsApp.jar to ensure that it gets deployed to tomcat under MainApp/WEB-INF/lib.

Surely Eclipse could have figured all this itself? That one web app depending on another web app MUST mean that the dependency would have to be deployed correctly?

Eclipse Deployment Assembly - Creates .war of dependency project inside main project WEB-INF/lib?

0 Answers0

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